Reading List

Michael Lewis: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday MachineMichael Lewis explains the 2008 financial crisis in the form of a deeply reported and elegantly written parable. He tells the story of a handful of marginal traders who predicted the meltdown and placed their own bets against the system. They made hundreds of millions in the ensuing subprime mortgage collapse, but remained bitter that no one listened to them, and no one is doing anything to prevent it happening again. Lewis closes with a quiet sermon directed at the public, the politicians, the regulators and the Wall Street manipulators. Nothing has been fixed. Nothing has changed. Time is running out.

Alexander Stille: Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian RepublicBrilliant piece of reporting and writing about the heroic efforts of local Sicilian prosecutors to take on organized crime and political corruption. In the U.S., these prosecutors would get elected governor or mayor, in Sicily they get blown up. Read it as part of my ongoing Sicilian researches, which started with Denis Mack Smith's History of Sicily. Have also read Stille's excellent Berlusconi book, The Sack of Rome, which is sort of a sequel to Excellent Cadavers.

Andrea Camilleri: The Shape of WaterThe first of more than a dozen Inspector Montalbano mysteries, all set in contemporary Sicily. I visited Sicily for a week last year, and was recently feeling nostalgic, so I tried one of these. As soon as I finished it, I bought the next one, which is endorsement enough. Here's a question: Why do left wing European authors always want to write about society through the eyes of heroic cops? Camilleri, Steig Larsson, Henning Mankell, Per Wahloo... It's an interesting phenom.

Geoff Dyer: Jeff in Venice, Death in VaranasiIs this a highly imaginative novel, a faithful travel memoir, or both? This is my first experience with the Dyer's very popular work, and I'm sold. He's dark, bleak, funny, and strangely uplifting. He's a great reporter, though his ambitions go much deeper than "mere" journalism. A bitter, hack journalist goes to Venice to cover the Biennale and falls in love. Then someone named Geoff goes to Varanasi where he experiences a strange spiritual crisis and, maybe, never leaves. That's the whole book. Not sure why it works, but it does. You figure it out.

George Gilder: The Israel TestHere's a guilty pleasure. I thought I was pretty pro-Israel, but Gilder is so militant he accuses Jeffrey Goldberg and Alan Dershowitz of being insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. That's hardcore. But his arguments about Jewish exceptionalism and the importance of the Israeli tech industry to global capitalism (not to mention Jewish contributions to the American economy) are provocative and compelling.

Richard Rayner: A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of AgeThe urban corruption that permeates so many Warners crime films and subsequent noir film classics wasn't inspired by New York or Chicago so much as Hollywood's own backyard. Rayner documents how Los Angeles became a major metropolis during the 20s, with all the dark underbelly that that implies. Raymond Chandler's novels and the Chandleresque film Chinatown were all set during the 30s because the clothes and cars looked better, but in fact the scandals they are all based on took place more than a decade earlier, back when Chandler was still working as a local oil executive.

Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner: SuperFreakonomicsA sequel to one of the craziest success stories in publishing, this time the two Steves are a bit more policy-oriented, prescribing provocative microeconomic solutions to global warming, health care, and terrorism. Small levers, big results. At least that's the idea. But these books aren't popular just because they are smart, or because they are going to change the world; they are popular because they are smart and funny and neatly divided, chpater by chapter, into tasty, bite-size morsels.

Joseph Kanon: StardustNo, not Neil Gaiman's Stardust. This is a new novel about Los Angeles in 1946, a psychological thriller set amidst the intersecting world of the Hollywood studios and the German emigres who arrived in L.A. after fleeing Hitler. I have no idea why this book didn't get more attention. It's a very fine and original novel. For one thing, I've never seen anyone get the inner workings of a Hollywood studio so well; and the conceit of writing a noir thriller set in Hollywood just as Hollywood was starting to perfect the noir movie genre, is pretty sweet. Of course, the roots of Hollywood noir can be found in German films of the 20s, whose creators emigrated to California, carrying Weimar's chiaroscuro and weltschmerz with them. They also brought their politics, which eventually attracted the attention of the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Complications ensue. You get the idea.

Per Wahloo & Maj Sjowall: The Laughing PolicemanReread this 70s Swedish classic as part of my deep Swedish mystery massage, inspired by Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This new Vintage edition features an intro by Jonathan Franzen, of all people. He turns out to be a longtime fan.

Henning Mankell: Faceless KillersInspired by Stieg Larsson, I read this, the first of Henning Mankell's police procedurals. If you liked the Sjowall/Wahloo Martin Beck procedurals of the 70s, then Mankell's Wallander is a worthy heir. (What is it with Sweden and all these amazing detective novels, all of which seem to become global bestsellers? There have been recent articles in the WSJ and other places trying to explain it, but they focus on the Swedish origins, not the international appeal.)

Stieg Larsson: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's NestSince the U.S. edition isn't due until mid-2010, I ordered the UK edition of the final volume in the series. As satisfying as the others, and as bittersweet, since there will be no further sequels, Larsson having died at the age of 50 after completing this, his third and final novel. (I note that the UK publisher is Christopher MacLehose, who I met twice while researching articles about Patrick O'Brian and George Macdonald Fraser.)

Stieg Larsson: The Girl Who Played with FireVolume two of the Millennium series, the late Stieg Larsson's reinvention of the sophisticated Swedish procedural made famous by writers like Henning Mankell, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, with a few irresistable dollops of Le Carre and Orwell thrown in for good measure. Completely satisfying, wonderfully imagined thrillers. Incidentally, the Swedish film made of the first novel is excellent, but the second, which I watched last night, is just plain bad. I guess the Hollywood remakes planned by Sony aren't as bad an idea as I thought they were when I first heard the idea. Still haven't see the third Swedish film, which is already Torrentable. But it seems that the heavily-plotted second and third volumes may simply be too dense for simple cinematic reduction. Something gets lost. Not sure if Hollywood can do any better.

Thomas Pynchon: Against the DayAs part of my Pynchon research for Wired, I forced my self to finish Against the Day, which I had abandoned midstream when it came out. A truly insane novel: parts boys adventure fantasy, alternative history, science fiction, American labor history, love story. It's a 1000-page nineteenth-century triple decker that takes place in Telluride, Venice, Los Angeles, New York, London, and lost cities deep beneath the surface of the earth... did I mention it is truly insane?

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's RainbowWhile preparing a piece on Pynchon's Inherent Vice for Wired, I took it upon myself to reread as much Pynchon as I could, including Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. The first 100+ pages of GR seem as ravishing and original as when I read them in high school in 1973, the year it was published. The book now makes much more sense as a true 60s novel. (That can now be said of all of Pynchon, I guess.) The dumb puns, the paranoia, the drugs, and the Norman O. Brown-style political psychologizing. Much easier to read than it was supposed to be; easier than Joyce, I think, who is clearly a major (if not the major) influence on Pynchon's inimitable style.

Salman Rushdie: The Moor's Last SighInspired by his latest novel, see below, I dug out another Rushdie classic that had been languishing, unread, on our bookshelf. Possibly his most Bombay-centric novel, which may be why I liked it so much.Because his reputation is over-defined by the success of Midnight's Children and the infamy of the Satanic Verses fatwa, I have to be reminded again and again that Rushdie really is a great all-round writer. The peculiar curse of all superstars!

Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of FlorenceRushdie's latest is an intriguing conceit. He ties the story of Akbar the Great, the Islamic conqueror who wed a Hindu princess and united 16th-century India, to a parallel tale set in Renaissance Italy. Akbar is also the subject of a fantastic recent Bollywood epic, Jodhaa Akbar. The Mughal emperor has become a popular symbol of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation, the utopian dream that runs through all of Rushdie's novels and permeates a lot of Bollywood films these days. It's a charming and strangely moving popular response to to the reality of terrorism and war in India and Pakistan right now.

Jerry A. Coyne: Why Evolution Is TrueHands down, one of the best introductions to evolution available, with special emphasis on the latest scientific advances, especially in genetics and evo devo (evolutionary developmental biology). Coyne is a real scientist, but he writes like an angel. His explanatory powers are positively Gouldian. The book is packaged as merely a polemical rebuttal to the creationist mob, but don't let that fool you. It's science writing at it's very best.

Lee Child: PersuaderThis is one of the bestselling Jack Reacher novels that Lee Child has been churning out for years now. I figured I had to try one, and since they were offering it for free on the Kindle (as a teaser to get you to buy a newer one) I gave it a try. These are certainly well-written entertainment machines, but I found Reacher's near-super-human facility for violence and his indestructability a little too James Bond for my taste. But Reacher is certainly an appealing tough guy, and the extraordinarily brutal action is nonstop... if that's what you're looking for.

Richard Price: Lush LifeMiss HBO's The Wire and looking for a fix? Price wrote for the series, and there's a lot of the same feel in this literary procedural set on Manhattan's lower east side. Word of mouth on Lush Life was incredibly high, so I was a tad disappointed. But Price can write, and for nine bucks on a Kindle, the price can't be beat.

Jonathan Rabb: Shadow and LightI'm always up for thrillers set in 20s and 30s Berlin, and I'm always a little disappointed. Philip Kerr, the best known writer in the genre, just isn't as good as you want him to be, so I was hoping this new entry by Jonathan Rabb would rise to the challenge. He gets the history and the atmosphere (and what's not to like about a subplot featuring Fritz Lang), but Robb eventually loses control of his own convoluted plot, leaving even the most attentive reader scratching his head. Can't really recommend this one.

Barcelona by Robert HughesRead while visiting Barcelona for the first time this fall. Hughes always writes like a dream. (Don't believe me? Check out his books on modern art, on Australia, on fishing...) Jennifer was reading Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and between us, we couldn't have been in better hands. The biography of a city is a genre I'm fascinated by. Can you write about a city as if it were a person, discovering its psychology and soul through its history? Short answer: Yes. Barcelona is exhibit A.

The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter MatthiessenI read Matthiessen's 1972 classic (originally a series of New Yorker pieces) while hiking and camping in Tanzania this summer. As I read his account of travels in East Africa a generation ago, I realized that, at times, I was in the exact same spot he was writing about. It's a classic of nature writing, deservedly so.

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul TherouxThis is the travel book I read after returning from a two week trip to East Africa. Surely, it's the necessary antidote to the tourist tendency to over-romanticize the African landscape while ignoring the dysfunctional political and economic side of things. Theroux lived in Africa during the 60s, a time of great optimism, and is revisiting four decades later. He finds everything worse.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig LarssonA sublimely readable thriller set in Sweden. It features the unlikeliest pair of hero-investigators: a middle-aged male journalist and a 25-year-old female computer hacker. What's not to like? There are two more in the series, and the Larsson juggernaut, though already at full throttle in Europe, is still building here. Part of the author's developing legend centers on his sudden death at age 50, just after delivering all three manuscripts to his publisher. This month's Vanity Fair (Dec, 2009) speculates about foul play.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence LessigProfessor Lessig's arguments should be familiar to Wired readers (he's a longtime contributor), but they still need to be made more familiar to everyone else. How many times does he have to explain the fact that technology has changed the rules, that antiquated copyright laws (or worse, draconian new copyright laws) are stifling creativity and holding back cultural and economic progress? This is essential reading for policy makers.

Anathem by Neal StephensonStephenson's first novel since The Baroque Cycle hits stores September 9th. He's one of the few people ever to grace Wired's cover twice, and he's written for us too. I've just started this 900-page doorstop, and I'm definitely in for the long haul. Steven Levy profiles Neal in the 16.9 issue of Wired.

December 30, 2009

I did a roundup of interesting people who died in 2009 for the Atlantic website. Here's the link. You'll find a strange bunch ranging from abortionist George Tiller to the Truffaut of teendom, John Hughes.

December 02, 2009

Last May, I wrote this short piece about Nabokov's posthumous novel, The Original of Laura, for Wired. It was part of our special Mystery issue, guest-edited by J. J. Abrams. Seems worth posting again here, six months later, now that the book is finally out:

He may be dead, but this fall Vladimir Nabokov is back with a new novel, The Original of Laura—or at least the beta version. Before he died in 1977, the author of Lolitaand Pale Fire asked his family to burn this last, unfinished work. But after three decades of soul-searching, his son, Dmitri, has decided to finally publish the unusual manuscript, written on 138 numbered index cards now yellowed with age. Nabokov routinely composed on such cards, shuffling and reshuffling the deck as he wrote. It was like constructing a puzzle.

As a boy in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nabokov devised chess problems, played with codes and ciphers, and later wrote his own crosswords—devices that would find their way into his later fiction. The novels and stories are generously seasoned with acrostics, anagrams, number games, and whodunits, not to mention parodies, puns, and multiple layers of hidden allusions.

Codes and concealed meanings were central to Nabokov's worldview, says Brian Boyd, an authority on the writer's life and work. "Nabokov felt that the thrill of discovery was one of the highest things life had to offer," Boyd says. "But he also felt that ultimately the whole of reality seemed to be constructed as if by some great cosmic prankster."

Nabokov, the authorial prankster, buried Easter eggs of every sort for careful readers to unearth. Along with an enciphered line from Shakespeare ("5.13 24.11 13.16 9.13.5 5.13 24.11"*), there's a multilayered chess problem embedded in his memoir, Speak, Memory. And in his short story "The Vane Sisters," an acrostic reveals an unexpected twist. (Take the first letter of each word in the last paragraph and string them together to find the secret message.) Pale Fire, his involuted, nesting-doll of a novel, has enough riddles and trapdoors to fill another entire book.

Boyd is one of the few people who have read The Original of Laura, to be published in November. "There's pleasure in it, but at the same time there's frustration, because you know that this may be—what?—two-thirds of the puzzle, or seven-eighths? You get some of the satisfaction but also some of the frustration of incompleteness."

The finished book includes facsimiles of every card, on perforated paper, so that readers can reshuffle them. It's a perfectly Nabokovian concoction, a tantalizing puzzler from the beyond.

November 30, 2009

The latest installment in the Call of Duty videogame series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, is the entertainment hit of the year. It took in more than $300 million its first day, and $550 million its first five, outpacing every movie release this year, including the latest Twilight chapter. (I predict it will beat out Avatar, too.) Given the historic significance (no one can deny anymore that videogames are bigger than movies), it seems worthwhile to call everyone's attention to a piece I posted last year that got an amazing amount of attention: Do First Person Shooters Make You Smarter? Keep in mind that there's a difference between the game I was talking about then and this new installment. The Modern Warfare 2 version of Call of Duty is not historical; this time it is set in a highly speculative near future. So one of mycentral points -- that these games promote an interest in history -- doesn't really hold. Still, it's deeper implication, that the runaway success of first-person shooters doesn't necessarily signal cultural apocalypse, is more relevant than ever, no?

November 23, 2009

This summer I made a surprise appearance in The New Yorker's website just because I happened to bump into into a college friend in the lobby of the Conde Nast Building. Vicki Raab factchecks for the weekly, but moonlights as one of their book bloggers. She noticed I was carrying a small bag of books. So here's what turned up on their blog a few hours later:

BOOKSPOTTING: MARK HOROWITZ ON SAFARI

Posted by Vicky Raab

I recently spotted Mark Horowitz, the New York editor of Wired magazine, in the lobby of the Condé Nast building. In one way he was, befittingly, “wired”; that is, he had to take the buds out of his ears and disengage himself from his little red Zune in order to talk. But in another way he wasn’t: he was packing a little brown paper bag full of books. He explained that he had just made a trek to Longitude Books, the travel bookstore on the wilds of Thirtieth Street, because in two weeks he was going on a ten-day safari in Tanzania with two of his kids, George, who is fifteen, and Eleanor, who is nineteen. It would be the first time anywhere in Africa for all of them, he said, and they needed to bone up on the literature and lore.

Half the trip was going to be on foot, with a guide, and donkeys to carry the tents, packs, food, and, he added, when pressed, “the books, I guess.” The other half of the trip was going to be in nice safari camps with trucks to take them out to see wild animals, and, yes, to carry the books.

Horowitz acknowledged that he was “totally Kindlized,” but he was a bit worried about recharging, and none of the titles he had purchased are available as downloads. Still, he said that he may bring his along for the plane ride. He plans to load it up with Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, the journals of both Stanley and Livingstone, which, he noted, were available free on the Kindle, and one of his favorite books of all time, “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo,” by John Henry Paterson, which he described as an amazingly weird turn-of-the-last-century true adventure story about man-eating lions in East Africa. As if that’s not enough to recommend it,Horowitz exclaimed, “It’s only $1.99 on the Kindle!”

That’s not only good news for the bookish world traveler on a budget, it saves close to a pound for the donkey.

November 17, 2009

In the August issue of Wired I wrote a guideto Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice. It was literary criticism in the form of an annotated map of Los Angeles, the new book's setting. The point was that Pynchon has always had a strong connection to L.A., where he lived and wrote for many years. And the new book's surprising secret was that it is openly, explicitly autobiographical in many respects. It comes as close to a memoir as we are ever likely to see from this author. This openness, once you know where to look, shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Pynchon has always been less secretive and reclusive than the media portrays him. He has been, for all intents and purposes, hiding in plain sight for decades, living a normal and extraordinarily productive life in Manhattan, by all acounts. The man just avoids interviews and photographs. To go with the piece, I created an interactive map of Pynchon's L.A. online and invited other Pynchon obsessives to add their own annotations, embedded below. I also added a bunch of extra notes of my own. I think it's still open, so keep at it!

UPDATE: Here are two of the many places that cited the map, including a funny post in the Times.

December 10, 2008

For fans of Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo, immerse yourself in obsessive Hawksian analysis at a ten day critical Hawks fest in blog form. This round is devoted to early Hawks, most of which is unavailable on DVD, but Bit-Torrentible. It's an interesting use of the blog form, especially if you've never seen or participated in one of these before:

November 26, 2008

Wired maverick Kevin Kelly has an interesting essay in this week's Times magazine:

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

November 10, 2008

Here's a wonderfully obsessive example of Haunted Screens in action. A Dutch guy uses computers to recreate a city block in Culver City (part of L.A.) the way it was back in the 20s.

I lived in Los Angeles for almost 15 years. It's still one of my favorite places in the world. As a film lover, I tracked down buildings and locations from all my favorite stuff -- from Preston Sturges's house (still there, though it was moved from its original location because of the construction of the 101) to Charlie Chaplin's original movie studio (now a recording studio).

This is as lovely, albeit small, a piece of computer forensics -- peeling back the false front of the present to reveal the ghosts beneath -- as I've seen lately.

October 19, 2008

I just noticed this odd fact. Computer programmer seems to be the the new default job for aspiring novelists. The number two bestseller on the Times fiction list this morning is The Story of Edgar Sawtelleby David Wroblewski. It was number one a week or two ago,thanks in part to it's choice as an Oprah Pick, and has been on the list for 18 weeks. This is Wroblewski's first novel. He's 48, and has been a software engineer for 25 years. His techie resume, which you can read here, is pretty hardcore. He says that writing software "teaches you a lot about building big intellectual structures and keeping them in your head, trying to figure out how they work, and understanding that they can work in one area and break in another. It's a good discipline for writing novels." What's funny is that he's not the first literary writer I've run into this past year with a tech background. Austin Grossman's great first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, came out in paperback this year. (Wired reviewed it here.) Austin used to be a video game designer. Then there's Karl Iagnemma, whose first novel, The Expeditions, came out in January. He's a robotics researcher at MIT. And, of ocurse, the godfather of techie novelists is Neal Stephenson, whose Anathem is also on the bestseller list right now. (Wired profiled him last month.) Stephenson, need I remind you, knows how to program, and once wrote a small book called, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line. Okay, so what does this mean? I have no idea. There was a period when every lawyer seemed to have an unfinished legal thriller in his briefcase. And years ago, future literary geniuses worked in advertising (Joseph Heller, Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter Carey). Now the Ken Cosgroves of the world are computer geeks. Is it an economic thing? Or has the nature of literature changed?